The Night Sky is a Landscape of Hope

Let's take a walk under the stars

Hello, Night Walkers!

Before we leave on our walk, I wanted to let you know about some discounts and seasonal offers.

First, all of the ebook versions of my books are on sale for at least 20% off until January 1, 2025, in my online store. You can get these books in a format that will work on any e-reader device or app, including Kindle, Kobo, Apple, and Google. They are also all available as PDFs. You can see the whole selection here.

Second, all of the physical copies of my books are on sale on Amazon for as low as I can make them. These books will never be priced lower, and the sale lasts until January 1, 2025.

Here are links to each title:

Pirate Haiku
Horror Haiku
I Stare at the Sea
The Joy of Nothing
Quantum Hope Infinite Melancholy
Wild Divinity
The Ultimate Book of Would You Rather… (authored under my pen name for books aimed at kids, tweens, and teens, S.K. Fowler)

Third, I’m doing my annual digital busking, where I make you a custom haiku comic for you or for you to give as a gift. You just let me know who the comic is for and a little something about the recipient or the desired subject. Then, you can pay me as much or as little as you like through Venmo or PayPal. To learn more, just reply to this email or send me a DM through the Substack app. You can also find more details here. Here are some examples from years past:

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Now, let’s get walking!

The Night Sky is a Landscape of Hope

Whether I die instantly in a supernova or perish from a slow exhaustion of all of my fuel, I hope that, like the stars, everything that is most precious inside of me will illuminate the darkest moments of my descendants’ lives as they fix their course and navigate uncharted waters.

Of all the things we can least afford to have a scarcity of in our world right now, hope is at the top of the list. There has never been a revolution, scientific breakthrough, or solution to a society-threatening problem discovered without hope.

Hope is a unique virtue that requires you to live and work in the present to build a better future, understanding all of the problems you face in the present moment. Hope is something you must cultivate and maintain. While some of us are more predisposed to holding onto hope, without work, hope will either dissipate or become corrupted into a sense of complacency.

How do you build hope?

Hope is made of three ingredients: gratitude, imagination, and wonder. When I start to feel my natural cynicism taking control, I know I must counter that by recharging my sense of gratitude, imagination, and wonder.

The easiest way for me to do that is to walk in the dark, under the stunning night sky. The night sky is a landscape of hope.

The stars are impossibly ancient and inconceivably far away. The night sky unites all of us Earthlings. It allows us to look up and see that there is more to our universe than our small planet. The stars connect us to the past and the future. The light we see from the stars has traveled so far that their sources may no longer even exist. Their light still shines for us, inspiring us to reach beyond our current limitations.

When walking under the stars, I can’t help but be awestruck. I soak in the wonders pouring down on me from the heavens. How can you be anything but gobsmacked and grateful when you start to consider how immense the cosmic scale is that our tiny planet is a trifling part of? Somehow, the stars make all of my problems seem manageable.

I can start to imagine a way forward, and more importantly, I once again feel the desire to keep trying, sparking inside my soul.

While I love to walk alone, I also find that night walks are best with others. Gawking up at the moon and the stars draws you closer and allows you to share secrets you might otherwise keep bottled up.

The night sky cures me of all of my future-gazing tendencies. I forget my anxieties and my regrets. I can only exist in the present under the burden of millions and billions of years of creation beaming down on me as I walk the only place we have found in the whole of the universe that supports such a myriad of life forms we take for granted.

What else could I want from life but the ability to walk, see, and hear the sounds of the heavens? Consumerism seems especially petty in the light of the full moon.

The night sky both allows my imagination to soar and grounds me in my body. I remember that all I am promised is this moment. There is a Buddhist teaching that you have no right to the fruits of your labor. The idea is that you cannot be working, expecting to receive something in the future. Instead, the work of the present moment must be enough for you.

To me, this is the core of hope. I will not see the future fruits from the seeds I plant today. However, I keep planting seeds because I hope the trees will bring shade and delicious sustenance to those who come after me.

I only write and draw because I cannot do anything else, and I hope my art will make a difference to someone else when they stumble upon it. But I have no right to expect anything else from this work.

Even though I am a work-from-home dad, I feel like a lost pilgrim searching the landscapes for clues about the meaning of life. Every time I read a poem by Mary Oliver or an essay from Henry David Thoreau, I am more convinced that whatever I am seeking is in nature.

When strolling under the stars, I feel I am closest to creation, to whatever mysterious force it is that has allowed me to exist. I sense that this force of creation doesn’t need or want to be worshipped. It only wants to make me whole and for me to see It inside of me.

The more I see of nature, the more I understand that we are all connected: the trees, the stars, the crabs, and you and I are all parts of the same whole. All of our yearnings are simply different manifestations of the desire to feel that wholeness.

Our brokenness and isolation from the universe cause all of our anger and angst.

This all seems easy to understand when looking up at the night sky, an intuitive truth.

When I stop looking up at the stars and the moon, I remember that I live in a dangerous time. The danger is much less for me than for so many others. But when I glance back upwards, I feel like the sky is chastening me. The stars seem to whisper, “Have you so quickly forgotten your lessons? You and I are not separate. We have no answers that you do not have inscribed on your soul.”

We humans often stretch ourselves thin trying to live in the past, future, and present. We spend so much time worrying about what will happen or about what we have or haven’t done before that we have no energy left for the only thing within our control: the present.

Mindfulness is not about productivity. The goal is not to relax enough to get more done. The point of mindfulness is to continually rediscover that we only exist in this moment. We can only do the work right now.

Hope allows us to have the resolve to do work we will never see the end of.

The universe has been kind enough to provide us with a night sky filled with wonders so that we can glance into eternity every once in a while and remember how to live in the now.

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason